Browsing Posts tagged seafood

It is kind of harsh to start with such an emphatic title. Particularly when I know that all of the volunteer’s hearts are in the right place and it’s kind of like the little old lady telling you she doesn’t need your damn help crossing the street.

But seriously, there should be NO volunteers working on oil spill recovery work on the Gulf Coast. NONE.

BP, Transocean, Halliburton and who ever else is involved in this massive catastrophe needs to pay the full costs of the clean up. They took a calculated risk for what would have been, and may yet still be fabulous rewards. But sometimes the dice come up snake-eyes and things go spectacularly wrong. This is the cost of being involved in the petro-chemical industry. They need to write the checks.

The state of Louisiana and the Federal government should not be in the business of wrangling free labor for what should be well compensated positions doing hot, messy and dangerous work. Working in the marshes along the Louisiana coast isn’t a day at the beach.

This oil spill threatens to impact the Gulf Coast economy for years to come. A billion dollar impact on the seafood industry and the ways that the money that won’t be coming in will ripple through the rest of the economy in lost taxes. The visitors that won’t be coming to Gulf Coast beaches. This is going to add economic dislocation to environmental disaster.

So BP (which I am using as shorthand for the consortium of contractors responsible) needs to hire people. They need to replace the money that would have flowed through the economy via the ways in which it has in the past, and free labor via volunteers just undercuts these workers and in a sense lets’ BP off the hook for the full cost of the clean up.

Everyone who is cleaning off a bird, everyone who is scooping oil out of the marsh, everyone who is grading the crude off the sand, needs to be paid for their effort.

If non-governmental agencies are called in for their expertise, and they should be, they need to document the man-hours involved and present BP with a bill and send checks to those working.

If this oil spill is going to suck 100 of millions, or even billions of dollars out of the Gulf Coast economy then it is up to BP to replace that by paying EVERYONE involved in anyway with Oil Spill Recovery.

And if they won’t pay? Then they need to have an assessment placed on their existing offshore leases which will have them forfeiting a significant portion of the money from their production from producing fields until everyone is paid.

So, I’m making a plea against the use of volunteers in the oil spill recovery. If you are coming to the Gulf Coast to work to clean up BP’s mess then you should be paid by BP.